Water & Power – 6.5

This documentary tackled a fascinating subject – water rights in California – but left me with more questions than answers. It approached the topic from several different angles but never tied them together. The people of East Porterville had no running water for three years. Something called the Monterey Amendments set water allocations behind closed doors, favoring Kern County or corporate interests, or maybe they were the same. Then there were the Resnicks, big LACMA donors and producers of POM and Fiji Water, who somehow gamed the system to get all the water they need for massive almond and pistachio groves. Other big companies are buying vineyards for access to the aquifers below. Clips of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown showed that this, whatever it is, has been going on for decades. The talking heads – lawyers and journalists mostly on one side of the issue – carried the football for the filmmaker’s anti-almond point of view, but the film’s vignettes pointed in various directions. One interviewee suggested that water should be a public resource, not a private commodity, which would have been an interesting thesis that might have connected some of these dots. But as Water & Power left it, I had no idea how the Resnicks’ use of water contributed to the paucity in Porterville, or why in the last scene they were bulldozing their almond trees.

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